Friday, June 27, 2008

Hot & Smoky

No, it's not some kind of spicy barbecued meat by-product. It's the weather in Sonoma County this week.

With over a hundred 131 fires raging in Mendocino County just upwind of us, we are enveloped in a sort of brown fog with a watery orange disc in place of the sun.

Of course, there are the wags who suggest that not everyone will want to avoid inhaling the smoke from Mendocino.

Click on the picture for the credit and story in the Santa Rosa newspaper.

There are more than 800 1,000 fires in Northern California. One of them is threatening Shingletown, east of Redding, where my sister and her husband have had to evacuate their newly built log cabin retirement home. Thank goodness, that fire seems to have been brought under containment.

After a week of staying indoors with the doors and windows closed, I couldn't stand it anymore and opened things up this afternoon. The air seems to be freshening a bit and is forecast to get better tomorrow.

BUT: Lightning is forecast for Mendocino County tomorrow and Sunday, which could start another round of wildfires. And many of this week's fires in remote areas are still growing because there aren't enough firefighters to go around.

It's early in the fire season, but thanks to a total failure of rain in March and April, California is bone dry already. I can only imagine what the rest of the summer will be like. I can only wonder if this condition is going to be permanent--this is the second extremely dry summer in a row, a condition predicted by the global warming experts, just like the Midwest floods were predicted.

If things get hot and dry enough that we no longer have a Sierra snow pack to draw on in the summer, we are going to be SOS. Bye-bye swimming pools. Bye-bye golf courses. Bye-bye landscaping. Bye-bye daily showers? Will we have to stop flushing our toilets and dig outhouses in the back yard? At best, will we have to ration water and pay gasoline prices for desalinated water from the ocean?

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About Me

I'm interested in what grows between the paving stones of received wisdom. I like to see what happens when people of differing opinion engage in respectful dialogue. There's not enough of that. I like to look at ordinary events and ask questions about why they are so. I try to spend some time really listening to trees and other silent things. I think about happiness, and the things people do to try to achieve it. What is happiness, and how do you know if you're happy? What are people really seeking when they seek happiness? For me, real happiness most often seems to come from doing something, however laughable, to make the world a better place. And, of course, reading the Funny Times